From an early age, Michele Liebler was involved in the patterns, shapes and colors of the perceived world. Later, in the mid 1980s, she studied with various painters who sought to perceptually capture contemporary life. In Liebler’s current exhibit, she wishes to record her surrounding private life paying homage to the French Intimists Vuillard and Bonnard. However, Liebler’s world of observation is not based on Vuillard’s concept of suggestion, rather on acute clarity of surfaces and delineations closer to the American “facticity” of things as well as the domain of photography and media. Her format for these works is usually not larger than 12 x 16 in., wishing to create the intimacy of a viewer entering a room and closely observing surfaces and patterns of people and objects. Some of her images center around her daughter and son’s clothes, shoes and furnishings. In the images of her son and daughter’s sneakers, one can observe their world as well as our epoch, and also be a reminder of the distance spanned from Van Gogh’s shoes. When her children are sleeping, it is only then that she feels time can be arrested to evoke the intimacy of the hearth. Liebler sees her present portraits as images caught in a dormant state, when the emotions can best be captured as dream states and the unconscious.